Canavan’s Comments (group member since May 15, 2018)

Canavan’s comments from the Spells, Space & Screams: Collections & Anthologies in Fantasy, Science Fiction, & Horror group.

Another past group read that I’m planning on (finally) polishing off...

“The Visitor from Taured”, Ian R. MacLeod

(view spoiler)[Some of our previous commenters found the "Analogue Literature" thread in the MacLeod story more or less offensive. I personally found it more puzzling than offensive; it didn’t prove a particularly good fit with the other themes and I found it a bit distracting.

For the most part I liked the two main characters (well written and fleshed out), but there is a tragic, man-out-of-time aspect to Rob that I found difficult to take seriously. In the end we are asked to entertain the possibility that Rob committed suicide simply because he couldn’t bear the notion of there being only a single observable universe. Perhaps I’m lacking in imagination or empathy, but I had difficulty in ginning up much sympathy for his plight. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭½

Well, I finally finished this book.

A few thoughts. Really, this was (in my opinion) one of the better anthologies the group has read over the past few years. There were two truly excellent pieces on display, “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar and “The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest” by Charlie Jane Anders. While there were a few entires that didn’t work for me, many of the remaining stories were really very good, including “In the Desert Like a Bone” (Seanan McGuire), “Badgirl, the Deadman, and the Wheel of Fortune” (Catherynne M. Valente), “The Thousand Eyes” (Jeffrey Ford), “The Briar and the Rose” (Marjorie M. Liu), and “Spinning Silver” (Naomi Novik).

Overall rating: ✭✭✭½

“Reflected”, Kat Howard

Howard’s story takes as its inspiration one of Hans Christian Andersen’s more popular fairy tales, “The Snow Queen”. Unfortunately, I’ve always found this particular Andersen tale a bit tedious, which may go some way towards explaining my dissatisfaction with Howard’s tribute piece. Oddly, it’s more science fiction than fantasy. I wonder, however, if this was the correct approach — the science part of this science fiction story (especially that found in the ending) is so suspect as to be quite distracting. (view spoiler)[I also found the emotions on display to be puzzling. The emotional nub of this story is the close bond between Zach and our narrator. Yet evidence for the importance of this relationship is only presented to the reader near the end of the story rather up front; when Zach initially disappears both the narrator and Lara react as though this rather catastrophic event were little more than a trivial inconvenience. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭

“The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle”, Sofia Samatar

There are a number of interesting things going in with Samatar’s tribute to a story from Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange . However, my tendency is to think of fairy tales (even retold ones) as tools to impart morals; but if that’s true, I don’t really understand what values I’m supposed to glean from the events of this somewhat opaque story. And some of the elements (e.g., a reference to the poet Shaimaa Sabbagh) don’t fit snuggly with others.

✭✭½

Joelle.P.S said (in part):

(Choosing first by authors I'm interested in, though I might peruse yall's comments above & read another 1 or 2 stories on recommendation.)

If you have time, I recommend checking out Cory Doctorow’s “Epoch”. Most of the folks in this thread liked it, myself included.

I am in the same situation as Shomeret. I read this anthology a number of years ago. I don’t see myself re-reading it, but I may chime in if I have anything pertinent to add.

Some final thoughts on this anthology. I’m not familiar at all with one of the co-editors, Daniel H. Wilson. On the other hand, I am well acquainted with John Joseph Adams, a very prolific editor. To be honest, I typically find his collections to be more or less average, and that proved to be the case with Robot Uprisings . There are two excellent stories in this anthology, Cory Doctorow’s “Epoch” and Seanan McGuire’s “We Are All Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War”. (Robin Wasserman gets an honorable mention for “Of Dying Heroes and Deathless Deeds”.)

Rating for anthology: ★★★

I’ll reiterate something I said in my first comment in this thread. Roughly two-thirds of the stories here are original to this volume and none were written before 2000. I know that as a genre science fiction doesn’t age particularly well, but I wish the editors included at least a few older, classic stories. It’s impossible, for example, for me to think of this subgenre with thinking of Jack Williamson’s 1947 novelette, “With Folded Hands...”

Lastly, let me echo Lena’s observation about the quality of the comments made by others in this thread. I enjoyed them immensely.

“Small Things”, Daniel H. Wilson

I dragged my feet a bit finishing up this last story. In part that’s because I don’t much like the practice of editors including their own stories in their anthologies. At least Wilson’s contribution turns out to be a reasonably decent effort. I wasn’t crazy about his writing style (e.g., too many tortured metaphors for my taste), but I did like the plot. (view spoiler)[“Small Things” can be viewed more as horror than science fiction; specifically, it reads like body horror. It’s kind of a mash-up of two famous books, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (with Caldecot playing the role of Kurtz and the narrator playing Marlow) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (the novella is littered with references to Shelley’s work, as, for example, when Fritz — an Igor-like figure — tells out narrator that he and Caldecot are “the ones strong enough to bring light into the world.” (hide spoiler)]

★★★½

J. said:

Facebook, YouTube, and the rest are in the position that they occupy because the US government carved out a legal niche for them to avoid copyright issues by foregoing editorial oversight. They exist and thrive because the Government sheilds them, for the specific purpose of being a place of free speech.

I’m not really sure that I understand any of this. I don’t really see what copyright law has to do with free speech and I know of no law which gives Facebook free reign to infringe on intellectual property rights. In any case, Facebook’s TOS specifically states that it does not allow postings that violate someone else’s copyright and/or trademark.

As to your last point, if you’re referring to the 1996 CDA, I think you’re oversimplifying. It’s true that the law provides service providers limited immunity for publishing information created by users, but there is a flip side of that coin; it also provides immunity for sites that take good faith action to restrict access to content that the provider or users deem “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”

You’re welcome to have the last word in this debate if you’d like, J. I’m going to be stepping away.

J. said:

Do you believe that someone else is better qualified to decide what speech is appropriate for your consumption than you are?

This is not a free speech issue. The First Amendment prohibits government abridgement of speech.

“Spider the Artist”, Nnedi Okorafor

I think I liked this story more than did Lena, but not nearly so much as Fiona and Shomeret. Perhaps this is a case of setting expectations too high. (view spoiler)[On one level “Spider” is a story about greed and the disastrous consequences of unfettered capitalism. On another it’s an odd kind of love story, more specifically, of the sort falling within the “love across battlelines” trope. (hide spoiler)]

★★★

“We Are All Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War”, Seanan McGuire

I have rarely been disappointed by an offering from this author, and this story proved to be no exception. I think of it as being, at least in part, about the terrible emotional consequences of war and the actions that those emotions can elicit. (view spoiler)[Morgan’s collaboration with Maya made me think, oddly enough, of the colonial experience during the American Revolution and how the question of choosing sides (patriot versus loyalist) was more complicated and less clearcut than is often taught in classrooms. (hide spoiler)] A final comment on this story: what a great title.

I will have to look into McGuire’s Kingdom of Needle and Bone . Thanks to Lena and Fiona for that recommendation.

★★★★½

Lena said (in part):

I cried buckets at Spielberg's AI... my poor date, lol.

Not a perfect film, perhaps, but one I’ve always considered as under-appreciated. And, yes, even after re-watching this movie a number of times, my eyes still get a bit misty during the final reunion sequence. 😢

Lena said:

Maybe you’re right and it was meant to be satirical but this guy spent his life inventing AI and I believe he thought it through beyond the science to what would happen at a governmental/societal level. Trying to legislate the values of the next generation is common, at least in the US. I’ve just never read it put boldly on display in a SciFi story.

Dang. You’re forcing me, Lena, to think more clearly about my problems with this story.

(view spoiler)[Let me first note, as sort of an aside, that McCarthy wasn’t just an AI researcher and computer scientist; he was well known in Usenet circles at the end of the last century as a conservative Republican and he could be counted upon to expound at length on various socio-political matters; I think those beliefs influenced at least in part the targets chosen in this story.

When I earlier commented that McCarthy “seems more interested in fashioning a satirical diatribe against large bureaucracies”, what I meant to say was that he was more interested in bureaucracies (both as they pertain to his fictional robots, but also the way in which they more generally govern all aspects of daily existence) than he was in the specifics of robot emotions. Personally, I was interested in the latter; not so much the former.

Maybe “satirical” was the wrong word to employ in this context. I didn’t necessarily mean to imply that McCarthy’s predictions for society were off base (although, now that I think about, his ideas about how privacy rights would evolve certainly haven’t been bourn out by the events of the last few decades), but rather to highlight the way in which he used irony and humor to make his points. However, as I tried to note in my first post, McCarthy’s use of that framework to the exclusion of others has the side effect of stripping all emotion from his tale. Reading “The Robot and the Baby” brought to mind my experience of reading Isaac Asimov’s old novelette, “The Bicentennial Man”, which covers ideas kinda similar to the ones McCarthy considers. I was pretty much just a kid when I read the Asimov story and were I to re-read it today might find it a bit saccharine, but during my initial read I was practically bawling. In contrast, reading “The Robot and the Baby” was an almost totally emotionless experience. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad story; I just think McCarthy missed an opportunity to make it a much better one. (hide spoiler)]

“The Robot and the Baby”, John McCarthy

I’m kind of on the fence about this one, but I suppose I would give it a grudging thumbs up. (view spoiler)[The story’s premise (emotional or at least quasi-emotional bonding between robots and infants) is one that ought to be rife with emotional potential, but McCarthy seems more interested in fashioning a satirical diatribe against large bureaucracies and thus the effort as whole comes off as unpleasingly sterile. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭

“Of Dying Heroes and Deathless Deeds”, Robin Wasserman

(view spoiler)[The story opens with a snippet of Siegfried Sassoon’s 1917 poem, “To the Warmongers”. That turns out to be a pretty unambiguous signpost about the direction this tale will take. Fiona, in her capsule review, refers to the writing as “gorgeous”. I was similarly impressed; I thought Wasserman did a really good job at conveying the emotional complexities of both bot and meat; the ways they were similar and ways they differed from one another. I was a bit disappointed in the ending, but perhaps that was because it was so bleak. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭✭✭

Lena said:

Canavan, it would have been more interesting if they had passed it as sexually - nanobot STD.

Yeah, I agree that that would have been interesting.

Lena said (in part):

How did they migrate, if that was, in fact, the ending?

(view spoiler)[I assume it works somewhat as follows: Person A, who is controlled by nanobots, somehow contrives to introduce new nanobots into a new host, Person B. Apparently, the story suggests, the process can be as simple as ingesting a suspension of nanobots in some liquid. (hide spoiler)]

“Nanonauts! In Battle with Tiny Death-Subs!”, Ian McDonald

(view spoiler)[The underlying premise is sort of interesting, if not wholly original. It’s the manner in which the story is told that left me a bit cold — the robot menace is taken on by a bunch of shallow gamers. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭½

“Seasoning”, Alan Dean Foster

(view spoiler)[Meh. This is the sort of story that someone with food paranoia might have written. The idea of robots being involved is almost incidental to the story’s primary theme. (hide spoiler)]

✭✭½